Dan Meyer in Math Curriculum Makeover:
This is a video I saw a few months back and have stumbled upon it a few times. I often think about the content of his talk and love the take home message of real life math and encouraging the kids to think.
I have applied a lot of his concepts into my classroom and teaching style. I look through the textbook for good teaching lessons that will allow me to encourage true thinking and authentic tasks once they have been manipulated and altered. The concept of the water tank problem has kept me thinking many times while I plan my math lessons because I love the idea of having the kids come up with the numbers for problems. No where in life is a math problem like we see it in a textbook, where all variables are presented for us. I watched a student of mine the other day work through a word problem and he highlighted all the information he felt was important. The question said something about a grade six class was on a field trip... they were 300 km away from home... they could travel 75 km/hr... how far from home would they be in 3 hours. I found it very interesting when he highlighted the number 'six' as in grade six and when questioned he said that six was important because it was a number in the problem and you have to highlight all the numbers. This was proof to me that there is a problem in understanding of the type of questions children are seeing in Math.
I found this video very thought provoking... I hope you do too!
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